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Anne Shaw

Originally from New York and New England, Melissa Buckheit's debut collection, Noctilucent, was published by Shearsman Books in 2012, and a chapbook, Arc, by The Drunken Boat in 2007. Her poems, interviews, photography, and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in VIDA: Women in the Arts, nth position, Fact Simile, Shearsman, Sonora Review, The Drunken Boat, Bombay Gin, Cutthroat and Blue Fifth Review, including her translations of the Modern Greek poet, Ioulita Iliopoulou. She is the curator of the Edge Reading Series at Casa Libre, teaches Writing & Literature at Pima College, and Aerial Dance at Zuzi Dance Co. She is also a dancer/choreographer and Massage & Bodywork Therapist. She lives in Tucson with her partner, Rebecca, and their son. (melissbuckheit.com)

From, A Concise History of the Female

“But please don’t cry— …
Beauty does not rest."

Anne Carson

What faith submits
my back a bridge for your feet
green ferns and day lilies over the pond
silver mirror and
inside the dark folds
smooth as stones,
the book
engages from suffering

Language unaccustomed from speech
malign me
I am not incremental
the flood as it imitates swallows
and I swallow but am not that
which is spoken of
grateful to be small
see the bodies as they float out to their graves
inside the tsunami

Her clitoris as it is cut out,
the light on the lintel as she is sewn
in the house of any village
sews my tongue
from the poem that breathes

In this urgency I speak to you, grieve,
make love—
the beautiful constellation of your brain
riding me into daybreak
a freedom past
unmanned bodies who have none, no sex left
have become liquid in the black dirt of a ditch
or only the words in my mouth,
speech through cotton

Karen Rigby was born in Panama City, Panama. She is the author of the poetry collection Chinoiserie (2011 Sawtooth Poetry Prize, Ahsahta Press, 2012) as well as the chapbooks Savage Machinery (2008) and Festival Bone (2004). Awarded a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and a residency at the Vermont Studio Center, she has been published in Poetry Daily, Washington Square, Meridian, Canteen, The Arcadia Project, New England Review, failbetter.com and other venues. She is currently a participant in the 2013 Flying House project, a collaboration between artists and writers, and resides in Gilbert, Arizona with her husband and son. (www.karenrigby.com)

Nightingale & Firebird

As if the song encoded in the wheel could railroad
to the garden, the mechanical grind transformed

the nightingale to music-box, the music to evergreen
vistas. The ﬁrebird was another story: inventory

of dust on the wings. Dried blood on the red-gold
coat. One thread about tin substitutes for splendor,

the other a ghost-image for your burdened heart.
Easy to confuse the black chinoiserie with feathers

torn from ashes, twin halves for a childhood fear:
you were never loved. You could surrender

to the hammer or the ﬂame but no one would come.
That which they called wonder was only a greased key

in a courtesan’s palm, and when the bird sang, no one
heard the sound a wing makes when the current breaks.

Anne Shaw is the author of Undertow, winner of the Lexi Rudnitsky Poetry Prize, and Dido in Winter forthcoming from Persea Books in 2013. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in journals including Harvard Review, Black Warrior Review, Denver Quarterly, Crab Orchard Review, and New American Writing. Also a visual artist, she is currently a graduate student of writing and sculpture at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her work can be found online at www.anneshaw.org.

Invitation

Voices drift across the the lawn
and form in the shapes of clovers. A slight breeze
bezels the fishpond, lens
of grainy light, black

cord covered with electric tape. Kneel
on concrete. Tile, sedge.

Koi ghost out
to meet you, blunt-
edged hunger curving
blindly up.

Take this bract that rises and subsides.

Butterscotch or red and white,
their bodies slick
as sorrow, lathered
with the cold, unseemly weed.